Biblion Bible Commentary
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The quarrel about Mark
Acts 15:36-41
36 After some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let’s return now and visit our brothers in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, to see how they are doing.” · WEB
The partnership that carried the gospel to the nations breaks up over a young man's earlier failure, and the text takes nobody's side.
The proposal is Paul's and it is affectionate: Let's return now and visit our brothers in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, to see how they are doing. The motive is pastoral rather than strategic. He wants to know how they are.
Barnabas plans to take John Mark. Paul didn't think that it was a good idea to take with them someone who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia, and didn't go with them to do the work. Both positions are stated fairly and neither is editorialized.
The cases are worth taking seriously, because the passage is regularly used to convict one of them. Paul's is about the work: the road ahead runs through the towns where he was stoned and expelled, and a man who left once at the first hard stretch is a risk to more than himself. Barnabas' is about the man: he had done this before, for Saul of Tarsus, when the whole Jerusalem church was against it, and the argument he is making now is the argument that once got Paul admitted.
Then the contention grew so sharp that they separated from each other. The word behind the sharpness is strong enough to have given English the term for a fit of temper. This is not a courteous difference of judgment. Two of the finest men in the book had a serious quarrel and parted.
What the text does not do is assign fault. There is no rebuke from the church, no verdict from the writer, and no reconciliation scene. It is the plainest account of a leadership breakdown in Scripture, and it declines every opportunity to tidy it up.
It does record the outcome, and the outcome is two missions where there was one. Barnabas takes Mark and sails to Cyprus, his own island, where the first journey began. Paul chooses Silas — a man from Jerusalem, a prophet, and, as will emerge, a Roman citizen — and goes overland through Syria and Cilicia. Barnabas disappears from the narrative at this verse and is never mentioned again.
The later evidence about Mark is worth having, because it settles who was right about him without settling who was right that day. Years afterward, in prison, Paul asks for Mark by name and calls him useful for service 2 Timothy 4:11. Barnabas' assessment of the young man was vindicated, and it was vindicated by Paul.
The detail that keeps the episode from being merely sad is in the last two verses. Paul goes out being commended by the brothers to the grace of God — the same phrase used when the church sent him the first time. The congregation did not take sides either. It sent both of them.
And he goes strengthening the assemblies, which is what he set out to do. The quarrel changed the personnel and not the errand.
settled What this mark means